Wednesday, June 30, 2010

June 2010

It's the last day of the month...guess I should update this blog!

We finally got the TV in the camper working...by buying a new TV. As I'd mentioned earlier, we switched from DirecTV to Dish Network which meant that we'd have to reprogram the Nomad 2 controller in the camper to work with Dish Network. I got out the instructions for the Nomad and did the reprogramming, which was pretty easy. Couldn't get the system to work. I even downloaded an update to the Nomad, but still couldn't get the system to work. Part of the problem was that, although the TV in the camper was HD, it didn't have an HDMI port like both of the TVs in the house do. We tried a lot of different ways of hooking up the TV to the controller, but just couldn't get it to work. The solution was to buy a TV that had an HDMI port and an HDMI cable...voila! We now have a working TV in the camper!

We found a Thai restaurant that has very good food...Sala Thai in Airway Heights. Next time we go, however, we're going to order mild instead of medium...if that's their idea of "medium," I'd hate to have their "hot!"

Seeing all the iris bloom at our house got me to thinking about getting iris that my grandmother, Melvina Suiter, had hybridized. Grandmother was an iris hybridizer from the 1950's through the late 1980's and registered something like 85 iris. After doing some research online, I was able to find only four of her iris at commercial growers: Orange Crush, Tomeco, Ladyslippers, and Sky Hostess. My mother has Big Momma, my brother has Wicked Witch, and my two aunts have some of her iris, too, although the identifying tags are long gone. Mom sent me Big Momma and Wicked Witch along with an assortment of other iris that my brother dug up at one of my aunt's houses. We'll be planting them within the next few days. Hopefully, I'll be able to identify at least some of the unnamed iris next year when they bloom!

We got a safe deposit box to put stuff in...the first one I think we've ever had. I'm busy now doing an inventory...taking pictures, writing down information, copying receipts and saving everything to a thumb drive which I will then put in the box, too.

Upgrading items in the house continues: we changed out both the kitchen and bathroom faucets; bought a new stove, and just today, had new windows installed. The windows, I'm sure, were the original ones from 1970 when this house was built. While they were double pane windows, they had aluminum frames (very energy inefficient) and two of them had lost their seals. Since we'll get a rebate from both the IRS and Avista (the power company), we decided to have all seven of the big windows replaced with vinyl-framed thermopane windows that actually open (five of the seven windows were fixed pane windows that didn't open). We'll probably have them come back this fall to replace the remaining four small windows.